Minecraft Creator Explains Why His Game Won’t Be Coming to Steam

Very recently, Electronic Arts stated that Battlefield 3 will not be released on Steam as according to the company, Valve has very “restrictive” terms. Surprisingly enough, Minecraft’s developer also announced they won’t be releasing their game on the digital platform any time soon.

Minecraft’s creator, Marcus “Notch” Persson, published a new post on his personal blog addressing this fact and explaining why his game won’t be coming to Steam:

“Being on Steam limits a lot of what we’re allowed to do with the game, and how we’re allowed to talk to our users. We (probably?) wouldn’t be able to, say, sell capes or have a map market place on minecraft.net that works with steam customers in a way that keeps Valve happy. It would effectively split the Minecraft community into two parts, where only some of the players can access all of the weird content we want to add to the game.”

Persson went on to say that he has been talking to Valve to get to an agreement that may work for both companies, but his answer wasn’t very comforting: “We are talking to Valve about this, but I definitely understand their reasons for wanting to control their platform. There’s a certain inherent incompatibility between what we want to do and what they want to do.”

In fact, his introduction to the topic was really nice and he praised the digital service in a very meaningful and respectful way: “Steam is the best digital distribution platform I’ve ever seen. I’ve spent incredible amounts of money on it, and I own a crazy amount of games on it. It runs great, offers great services like that shift+tab stuff, and it remembers my credit card details so there’s no barrier for me when I want to buy a game.”

It’s a shame that Steam users won’t be able to get Minecraft when it officially comes out, but let’s just hope this decision is made to keep the integrity of the game as their developers (and creator) originally intended.